


Stand By Your Man

by RosemarysBabysitter (TashaElizabeth)



Category: Trouble in the Heights (2011)
Genre: Car Sex, Domestic Violence, Drug Use, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Fist Fights, Gun Kink, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Oral Sex, Riding Crops, Rough Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Sickfic, Sugar Daddy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-02-13 15:12:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 16,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2155227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TashaElizabeth/pseuds/RosemarysBabysitter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’d tried to explain it to her friends over margaritas at girls night out. They’d looked at each other with concern and then one of them had said softly, seriously, that you weren’t supposed to be actually afraid of your boyfriend. “Says who?” she’d replied, as though ‘fear’ described the hot tide of her blood. As though Nevada would ever be anybody’s ‘boyfriend.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Intro

Nevada was a bad man who did bad things and one of things he did was handle her, roughly and with propriety. He liked to do it in front of other people. Sliding his hand across her ribs so that his thumb stroked over her high breasts. Perching her on his lap and tapping his fingers against her inner thighs. He liked to show that she wouldn’t stop him. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she tried. His hands on her felt huge and important. Cosmic: infernal or divine. It was an innate quality to him, unrelated to his physical swagger or the wide span of his fingers. Nevada entered a room and focused her universe to the size of his will. He put his hands on her and she liked it. The shock of her knees on the floor of the apartment he’d started paying for. The way his hot soft palms coaxed open her mouth. His fingers finding a tangled hand hold in her hair. When his cock hit the roof of her mouth she felt known. Localized and contained and blissfully quiet inside. He told her what he wanted and she did it and if she did it wrong he corrected her with short, simple commands and the swift stinging pressure of his touch.

She’d tried to explain it to her friends over margaritas at girls night out. They’d looked at each other with concern and then one of them had said softly, seriously, that you weren’t supposed to be actually afraid of your boyfriend. “Says who?” she’d replied, as though ‘fear’ described the hot tide of her blood. As though Nevada would ever be anybody’s ‘boyfriend.’ She stopped going to girls night after that. She waited at home for his call. For the sound of his key in the door.

Sometimes he came over while she was sleeping and woke her with the weight of his body on top of her, his mouth at her neck. He smelt like smoke and sweat and the street. He would shove down the lace hem of her panties and pull open her legs so that the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was his face as he thrust into her.

There was always money. He left it in gritty hundred dollar bills that she kept loose in the bottom drawer of her vanity. She never worried about money anymore. She didn’t worry about taking the alley to the corner store or going down to the laundry room by herself. When she walked at night it was with the breathless freedom of his protection. 

She didn’t even really worry about making him happy. Nevada took the things he wanted without thought and he went seamlessly from impulse to action; pressing her back against the brick wall of the parking garage, putting her hands under his jacket in the dark corner of the club, throwing her down on her sofa, her painted hardwood floor or the slick white sheets of her bed.

He never said he loved her but sometimes, in the last hitch of his breath before he came, he would stroke her face and call her “such a good girl.”


	2. H/C: Sick

She was sick with fever, so flushed and woozy that the streetlights outside bobbed and sparkled like stars. Nevada had called half an hour ago, shouting over the music. She’d got into her new dress, blue chiffon and gold chain. She’d put on her makeup and gone stumbling out of the house to get a cab. She made a stop at the corner for cough syrup and as the car pulled up now to the dank little bar that Nevada was sitting inside, the double dose of medicine hit her empty stomach and made her head spin. She paid the driver too much and got out of the car.

Inside, the music thrummed through her. Nevada was dancing with two little blond things, one in his arms, the other clinging to his back. He caught her eye and she smiled at him. Nevada liked dancing with anyone but he especially liked dancing with pretty people right in front of her. He liked the way it never occurred to her to complain about it. Once when he was dancing like that, she’d let another man pay for her champagne at the bar rather than futzing around with Nevada’s credit car. Midway through the night, the man had returned from the bathroom with blood dripping from his eyebrow and something broken in the bones of his face. After that she used the credit card.

She went to bar and asked for a screwdriver with lots of ice and almost no vodka. She took it back to a corner table, under the blue throbbing lights and she put her head down on the sticky table. She coughed, intermittently, and when she did the whole curve of her body lifted briefly off the table.

For a while, she struggled to remember if she’d had sex in this bar, not the night with the champagne but another night, in a private room up in the balcony that overlooked the dance floor. She had, she finally decided, but it had been sometime last year when the bar had another name and another owner and a different, but equally hideous, neon color design. On a red velvet couch with people walking past the doorway and the music beating down below, Nevada had given her puffs of his cigar and laughed at her. She’d tried to get down on the floor to show him she could do better. She had been giggly and felt so wild, her heart always thudding away in her chest. He hadn’t let her. He’d taken her into his lap, facing him and finding her thighs under a voluminous tiered skirt. He had held her so tightly and she had put her forehead against his when he began to tense and perspire. He had not finished the cigar.

Nevada came to her after a while, a long period of beating bass and swirling lights with the bar coming in and out of focus around her. Her drink had sweated a perfect circle around the glass on the table top. She propped her face on her fist and took a sip of it. The cool liquid burned down the sides of her throat. He was not angry but jocularly annoyed, which made him unpredictable. She prefered when he got angry.

“Am I keeping you awake?” he asked. 

She raised her head and shook it. “No.”

“Excuse me?”

He had his hands on his hips. She tried to go to him, to touch his face and calm him down with her pressure but she realized abruptly that she couldn’t stand and fell back into the booth bonelessly.

He looked down at her but didn’t move to help her.“Are you stoned?”

“No.” She rubbed the place between her eyes with the flat of her fingers. “I think I’m sick.” She knew she was sick, but Nevada had a way of turning her statements into opinions. She reached for him, trying to take his arm.

“Come here,” he directed and when she staggered he swept his arm under her knees and pulled her into his arms. She put her arms around his neck and breathed in his sweat and the sweet smell of his cologne. He hoisted her weight easily. The extra fabric of her dress fell, draped, over his arm.

At the door, someone popped up to them and stuck his face in hers. “Are you okay, sweetie?” he asked. 

“Fuck off,” Nevada answered sharply,.

The person persisted. “Are you okay? Do you need some help?”

“Fuck off,” Nevada repeated.

“I’m fine,” she said, quietly. “He’s taking me home. I just want to go home,” She clung to Nevada tighter. 

He put her in a car by curb. She curled up in the passenger seat with her head against the window as he strode around to the driver’s side door, let himself in and immediately backed the car into the street. Someone came out of the club and looked at the car with dissatisfaction. Nevada cursed.

“I could have taken a cab,” she said.

“Don’t be stupid.”

The car screeched as it pulled away.

He brought her to her bed, flipped on the air conditioner so that it spat and sputtered cool air into her muggy little bedroom, and stripped her of her dress and shoes. He told her to go to sleep and she whined like a child. 

“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve been trying.” She was still wearing her frilly little push up bra and her hair in a sleek ponytail. “Everytime I swallow I wake myself up again.”

He got down on the bed with her and put his hand on her throat. She didn’t know what he was feeling for, but her skin seemed to burn against his hand. He dug into his pocket and took out some pills in a twist of plastic. He bit one in half, swallowed and then fed her the sour tasting half pill. She sucked the crushed powder off his fingers. His hand went to her belly after, rubbing her fevered skin.

“You’re fucking up my whole night,” he said, nodding his head at her. It was a prompt. She nodded back at him. He put his hand on her panties, pressing the heel of his palm down. “I wanted to go out. Have a good time.” She nodded again. He put his fingers down her underwear, soft touches, long strokes. She arched against him and he wrapped her hair around his fist, three short loops before pinning her head to the pillow with it. 

He kept touching her and she pushed her feet down against the sheets which fluttered cool and slick under the air conditioner. “What am I supposed to do with you?” he asked. His nose was against her cheek. 

She put her hand on his wrist. “I can’t.”

“You can.”

Her eyes were falling shut. By the time she came, shaking and swallowing the air, she was almost asleep.


	3. Public: Street

“Baby!”

She jumped, grabbing her purse to her side at the sudden, boisterous greeting. Aside her, in the street, a large car came rolling up. It’s window was down and sitting in its back seat, leaning out the window and letting out all the cool air was Nevada. He was smiling. “What you doing out so early?”

It was ten thirty in the morning. The car rolled next her at a crawl, matching her walking pace. Nevada stopped smiling and cocked his head at her. She couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses and couldn’t guess at his mood without the guideline of his gaze.

She gathered her wits together and beamed at him, faking a shy look through her eyelashes. She didn’t stop walking. “I was going grocery shopping,” she explained. Her voiced was high in her throat. “I was gonna make cookies.”

The statement fell flat and he looked at her for a long moment, then licked his lips. “I’ll buy you cookies,” he said finally. “Get in.” He ducked back into the car and a second later the door sprang open. 

She got into the car and it took off into the street. She sat next to him, her thigh warm against his his. She was radiating heat in the backseat and he cuddled close to her, wrapping his arm around her shoulder heavily. She put the purse on the floor and he took advantage of the movement to kiss and bite at the skin of her neck.

He put his hand between her legs, tucking down the thinned fabric of her too short dress. She wriggled against him and let her head fall back against the seat. 

“I was thinking,” he said His voice has thick in her ear. His lips brushed her skin. “Maybe you could do me a favor this morning.” He pulled down the neckline of her dress and sucked noisily on her collarbone. She could have leanred forward and buried her nose in his hair, but instead she opened and closed her sweating palms against the car interior. 

“What do you want me to do?”

He smiled against her sternum. “I just want you to go to a place and pick up something for me. I was gonna send my boy, but I think you’re better.” Then he got down on the floor in front of the seat. 

She looked up briefly into the rear view mirror and awkwardly made eye contact with the driver, a wide eyed boy in a black t-shirt. They both looked away quickly. Nevada put his head under her skirt and his mouth against the soft, sweating flesh of her thigh. She surged up against him and he put his thumbs against her hipbones and pressed her back firmly in her seat. 

She said his name, softly, under her breath and with one hand dragged aside the crotch of her panties for him. He licked alongside her fingers and when she was wet and crazy and digging her fingers into the seat cushions, he stopped the car across the street from a subway station and pressed some money into her hand. She shouldn’t use her card, he explained. She got out of the car and the blood rushed her head, clouding her hearing briefly. Nevada had to repeat his directions. Nevada hated repeating himself.

She walked sharply, jaywalking across the street, to the subway entrance and clattered down into the station. She had to hustle to catch the train on the track there. With each step her daytime inappropriate heels clicked steadily on the ground. With each step she throbbed and swooned. She ducked through the doors as they rolled closed.

She sat in the last open seat, her thighs wet where they crossed each other. She was acutely aware of the seediness of it all. The wet patch on her underwear, the rising human smell, the flush of her cheeks and the catch of her breath. She smiled to herself and when she blinked she could see Nevada behind her eyelids and imagine his touch in each dizzy headed breath she took.

She went to the address he had said. She knocked. She waited for a long time outside an apartment door while inside people scrambled and swore at each other to hurry. She stood in her heels with her breasts feeling high and tight under her halter dress. She dropped her right shoe on the floor and rubbed the back of her left leg with her wriggling toes, delighting in the smooth feel of her own skin.

The door opened and she stepped back into her shoe. A nervous looking man in a skull cap nodded at her.

“I’m here for him,” she said. She didn’t have to say his name. The man gave her a heavy paper bag and she tucked it away in her purse without looking inside. She smiled at him, dreamily, and he flinched away from her and shut the door.

She strutted all the way back to the subway.

Nevada was sitting in his car right where he said he’d be, halfway down the kind of alley her mother was forever telling her to avoid even before noon on a sweltering Tuesday. He had discarded his driver and the body of the car seemed to elevate him above the dirty street. He was enthroned. She slid into the passenger seat and brought out the bag.

He opened it and underneath some papers and fliers he pulled out two thick stacks of cash, saran wrapped together into solid bricks. He opened one, letting it roll down the length of plastic into his lap before paging through the bills, counting under his breath. He smiled. He tossed the money into her seat and then he grabbed her out of it. She went into his lap without struggle.

She pushed his sunglasses into his hair and kissed him. She could not taste herself on his lips. Nevada’s mouth never tasted like anything but smoke. 

He pressed his hand into her panties and his first and second fingers found her still wet and easy for him. She moaned against him. She put her hands at the base of his neck where his hair was thick and cool under her fingertips. He opened his pants, brought out his cock and pressed it against her, rutting and slipping between her thighs until he was inside her, hard and solid and completely necessary.

She was high on her knees and rolling her hips forward in tight, short movements. He tried to bring her further down onto him, hands hard and grasping at the rim of her hips. She hit the steering wheel sharply each time. He tried to reach under the seat to adjust it and, with his hands clutching her skin and tangled in her underwear, he got frustrated and opened the door instead. Together they went spilling out into the alleyway.

She was used to his weight, but it drove the breath out of her anyway and there were sharp stones and grit scratching into her back as he drove her down onto it. His feet were still in car. The heels of his shoes pushed off the side of the seat and he leaned forward to plant an arm over her head. She wrapped her legs around his body, crossed her ankles. Her hair was caught under her back and with each movement it pulled at her scalp and hurt her. Everything hurt her. The stones on her back and the sun in her eyes and gun at his side, biting and catching on her thigh. It all hurt and it was beautiful and she threw her arms around his neck and didn’t let go. The pleasure flooded her head, going on and on and on, like being held under water and coming back to the world dazed and wide eyed and breathless.

After, he drove her to her block and let her out on the corner. Before she got out out of the car, he tucked fifteen hundred dollar bills into the top of her purse and put his sunglasses back on before he kissed her face.

She went up the stairs to her apartment and washed off the dust and stickiness in a long cold shower. She put on her robe and it clung to her silkly as she turned on the television and let it play an old movie at a high volume. She dumped her purse out on the coffee table. Out fluttered the cash, gum wrappers and makeup, receipts and pencil stubs. From the bottom she retrieved the business card that had been given to her that morning by a sympathetic vice officer. The man had smiled sadly at her from across the table and said, “this doesn’t have to be your life.”

Carmela tore the card into tiny fragments and then she lit her Virgen de Guadalupe candle and burnt each piece into unrecognizable ash.


	4. Public: Restaurant

It was a nice place with candles on the tables and fresh cut flowers at the bar. The waiters were all in squeaky shoes. They’d both been drinking, before and during dinner. The heat rose up into Carmela’s cheeks and stayed there. She didn’t eat enough and she laughed a lot. Halfway through his steak, she dropped her shoe off her foot and dragged it up the side of his leg. He put his knife down business like and picked up his glass.

“Go to the little girls room, take off your panties and bring them to me.”

She flushed severely. 

“I beg your pardon?”

Nevada’s shook his head. “Don’t do that. You heard me.”

“Why?”

He laughed and put his hand over hers. It was warm.

Carmela extracted her foot from between his calves and rose from the table. In the privacy of the oversized handicapped stall, she put her hands over her cheeks and closed her eyes. By the sink an older woman in a suit worth more than Carmela’s rent was applying lipstick in the mirror. She smacked her lips with relish. A incongruous smile burst across Carmela’s face as she hiked up her skirt and pulled her underwear down. She’d put on a pair of diaphanous blue silk. She slid them down her legs and balled them up in her left hand. 

The skirt she was wearing was not over long and her heels made her feel like she was showing more leg than she was. She tugged at the fabric on his hips as she walked, dodging past other tables. The smile did not fade, nor did she raise it from the carpet, until she returned to her table.

There was a man sitting in her seat. His hands were folded over her ricotta. There was a moment before Nevada noticed her and she saw the anxiety in his face. 

“Um,” she said.

Nevada swept her to his side, snug under his arm on the bench seat. Her fingers dangled off his knee. Carmela’s Spanish was not great and the resources she had found to supplement it, when she bothered to do it at all, tended toward broad Mexican accents just different enough to confuse her when Nevada spoke. By concentrating very hard, she could understand about half of everyday conversations. A business meeting, which this was clearly turning out to be, dropped her comprehension down to a third. The men talked, seriously and respectfully. 

Nevada pulled his arm from around her and slid it under her own, circling her knee. Slowly, he began to inch up the fabric of her skirt until he stroked her bare skin. Her breath caught in her throat and she reached for his water glass to cover. Nevada slipped his middle finger inside her.

The glass was cold in her hand and she rested its lip against her cheek to feel the icy semi circle against her skin. She was wet under his fingertips.

Whatever they were talking about, Nevada was agreeing with the man in the compulsive, aggressive manner that indicated the man’s importance. The thought of someone more important than Nevada made Carmela squirm.

He turned his hand and dragged his knuckles across her clitoris, pinching her soft wet skin. She put the glass down too loudly, clattering against his plate but nobody looked at her. Nobody would look at her. She thought, absurdly, that Nevada could throw the plates down on the floor and fuck her sliding and slipping all across the little dinner table and nobody would notice _her_ at all. 

She turned her face to him and felt the huff of her exaltation reflecting off the skin of his neck. Her eyes went glassy and she shivered.

Nevada took his hand from between her legs, brought his fingers to his mouth and sucked them with a loud wet noise. Carmela flinched and brought her knees together sharply. The movement spurned a shock of pleasure, quivering along her pelvis. She slipped the panties in his hand as an after thought. 

Nevada bundled them into a napkin and left them on the seat when he rose. He shook the man’s hand and agreed with him again. Carmela was a second late on the gesture and came scrambling out of the seat to latch onto his arm. Her skirt was up too high and she moved to pull at it with her free hand. Nevada dragged her away and she smoothed her hand down her ass to reassure herself. Nevada saw the movement and imitated it, tapping his fingers against the crease of her leg.

“What was…” she began.

“Not here,” he said.

He did not lead her out the front. There was a hitch of nerves in his steps, a constant seeking turn to his gaze. He put his hand over her arm very sharply. His ring dug into her skin.

They went through the kitchen, which always struck Carmela as less glamourous or well lit then it looked in the movies. The busboys scrambled away from them. Nevada didn’t bother to track them down. They went staggering out into the alley, both missing the step down from the back door into the street. 

He pivoted, tossing her up against the brick work and throwing his arms around her neck. He sucked at the skin just below her ear.

She reached for his belt. The heavy buckle was awkward in her fingers as she opened it. “Are you freaking out?” she asked, mesmerized by the thought.

“Shut up,” he directed and, hitching her leg up in his right hand, slid into her all at once, full and thick and the most important thing in the world.


	5. Toy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is rather a stretch for the prompt, which was ' buying her ahem toys and insisting to watch when she first tries them'. I'll have to try this one again.

It was a joke, or at least it started as one.

A man in too tight a t-shirt got too close to her ass up at the bar and Carmela whirled and slapped him on instinct. There was a moment of stunned silence and then Nevada’s breathless laughter.

Two hours later, at Carmela’s old club with the music too loud and all her old work friends stopping by to order drinks on their tab, Nevada disappeared for thirty five minutes and returned with a present for her. It was a riding crop, sleek with vinyl material and recognizable from one of the fetish dancer’s collection. He gave it to her in front of people so that he could tell the story again. There was obvious glee in his face as other’s took in the contrast between his words and her person, sitting meekly in the booth under his arms. It made him smile. It made her feel small.

She took the crop and carried it all night, in the drizzling rain and the cab rides. It was four in the morning by the time they got home and he cornered her up against the door. It was that red hued and wet breathed time of morning that made all one’s decisions feel immaterial. He dropped his jacket and shirt on the little table she kept by the door. He was crooning to her. She was holding the crop. 

She asked him, softly, why exactly he’d given it to her. 

“I told you,” Nevada said, magnanimously. He cupped the side of her face with firm pressure before turning her face toward his. “It’s for hitting the boys when they grab at you.”

“All the boys?” she clarified.

“All of them.” His mouth went to her neck.

The impulse came to her at once and she squashed it. His hand went to her left breast, pushing down her neckline and tugging at the cup of her bra. She liked that bra. She could feel the fabric stretching. The impulse came to her again and then she hit him, smartly, on the outer part of his thigh. The smack was loud in the quiet of the darkened apartment. 

Nevada paused. He looked at her.

She adjusted her grip on the crop and, swallowing, rubbed the crop against his leg where she had hit him. She hit him again, in the turn of his knee and felt him buckle slightly against the sting. Her mouth tasted sour.

“Excuse me?” Nevada asked. He spoke very slowly. There was tension in the corner of his jaw. She brought the crop up and stroked there with long, gentle movements as though she were playing a violin. 

Nevada, very slowly, let his eyes fall shut and his head fall against the movement of the crop. His hands were still hard upon her body. She mussed his hair. His body still cornered hers against the door.

“Baby,” Carmela said. She tapped his jaw with the rod.

Nevada’s eyes snapped open. He took a step back, releasing her. The crop dropped away, hidden behind her legs. His eyes were dark, dangerous and seething. For a moment she thought he would rush her. He looked her up and down for a long time. Then he got down on the floor, on his knees on her squeaking floorboards. 

Nevada put his hands out, palms up and steady. He didn’t look at her.

She took off her dress, tossing it over the arm of the battered sofa. Beneath it she wore a black slip, fraying at the hem. Loose threads tickled her knees. She looked at his hands and the wide breadth of his spread fingers. 

She was missing something, she could tell. She circled him, tapping the end of the crop against his bare shoulders. He was sweating. She dragged the end of the crop up behind his ear, through his thick hair. He shrugged it off roughly. His hands returned to the air in front of him. 

She brought the crop down hard along the lengths of his palms, the vibrations radiating up into her arm. He hissed, winced, but did not withdraw.

“Did you do something, baby?” she asked. Her voice was soft and lacked command. She put her foot on his thigh, pressing her weight into his flesh through her shoe’s high, polished heel. “Did you do something bad?” She brought the crop down again and then a third time in quick succession. Nevada dropped, curling his hand around her heel, the other traveling up her leg. She could feel where she had striped him with a fiery heat. 

“Worse than usual, I mean,” Carmela said. She stroked the curve of his back with the crop’s end. “You can tell me.”

He shrugged the crop off his shoulder again and she caught his chin with the rod of the crop and brought his face up to look into hers. His eyes were wider than she had ever seen them before.  


“Lots of things,” he said.

“Tell me,” she said, and then grasping at an association added, “Tell Sister Carmela all about it.”

Nevada groaned, his eyes closed and he lurched forward, burying his face in the silky fabric covering her thighs. She went to the floor, into his lap, and he put his hands on her again. She pried one huge, heavy hand away from her breast and tapped it firmly right in front of Nevada’s face.

He caught the crop in his hand and tugged it away, throwing it to somewhere in the apartment shadows. His eyes had their power again. She ground down against his hardened cock. Her hair dangled over one shoulder, obscuring his vision. His hands pinched the smallest part of her waist. She was overflowing again and she suddenly needed, firmly needed, the comforting confines of his strength.


	6. H/C:Injured

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt asked for ' sex after some fight where he's angry and his fists are bloody, or maybe he lost a fight and she's patching him up and he tries not to act like it doesn't hurt ' and this isn't really either of those, sorry anon.

He didn’t call and he didn’t ring the bell either but he banged on the door, yelling and swearing, until she woke. The neighbors woke too, sticking their heads out of their apartment doors and starting to grumble about calling the cops. She smiled at them first, made soothing gestures with her arms as she brought him inside. He threw his arm over her shoulder and put his weight on her. He smelled like sweet burning plastic. He was bleeding.

“Jesus, baby. What?”

“You should see the other guy,” he mouthed against her ear, “but you won’t.” He laughed.

When she took off his jacket a lot of blood splattered onto her grimy kitchen floor, dripping off the turn of his knuckles. She put him in a chair, got a rag from the drawer by the sink, dropped her bathrobe in a heap by the wall. The lights were too bright for this kind of night. Nevada looked up at them, blinking and unable to place them. She went to mop the blood off his face and he grabbed her hips and pulled her into his lap. She stood on her toes to touch the floor.

“Did you maybe take something for the pain?”

He turned his attention to her breasts, loose under her t-shirt. “Well, there was a lot of pain.” He grabbed her nipple, rolled it between finger and thumb. She ignored him, dabbed at his right eye. The skin below the smeared blood was already swelling.

“You’re going to have a shiner.”

“Stop fucking with that.” He batted her arm away, took her wrist in his opposite hand, pulling her arm across her chest. His right hand went to her face, sticky on her chin and ear. He traced his finger over the curve of her bottom lip. She could taste copper. He laughed again, lurching toward her. “Good thing you don’t keep me around for my pretty face.”

She hazarded a smile. “Of course not. It’s your big dick, Papi.”

He didn’t laugh but released his grip on her arm. She wished he hadn’t. She turned her attention to the puncture in the meat of his shoulder. It was bleeding and went deep. 

“I think you should go to the emergency room.”

“Oh fuck that.” His hand found the curve of her ass under her pajama shorts. “‘Your big dick’, you think I want to hear that shit?”

She began to unbutton his shirt, pushing the fabric down his arms. “No.”

“I don’t want to hear that. I know what I do; I give you what you need. Not what you want.” He had both hands on her ass now, kneading and pulling her to him. He watched her breasts moving as he spoke. “Not what you deserve. What you need.”

She put her nose directly against his and looked into his eyes. “You’re really stoned.”

“You’re pretty.”

He didn’t fuck her. When she said she was putting him to bed he made fake put upon noises and tried to carry her to her mattress. Drugged and wounded, he couldn’t take the weight and they fell onto the floor, crawled onto the sofa. He covered her body with his in the dark. The weight of his arm lay between them. She had struck her hip against the coffee table and it pinched under his warmth for a long time. He kissed her. He kissed her slowly for hours, stopping to listen when she begged or whimpered, so still she was sure he had passed out. She would fall into frustrated silence and then he would kiss her again, with determination. He put his thigh between her legs. He kept his clean hand on her throat, tapping the swell of her windpipe. She was shaking too much to tell if he was shaking too. He didn’t speak. He kept his clothes on. It went on and on without climax.

Later he moved once and hissed and then moved again and howled. She took him to the free clinic where she told them she tripped coming down the stairs with a screwdriver. The doctor was too tired to raise an eyebrow at her lie. They put him upstairs in a room with white sheets and gave him morphine so he wouldn’t yell. He held her hand until he fell asleep.


	7. Catfight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nobody prompted this, I just listened to too much [Loretta](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W9zQD8KYew) [ Lynn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgylOni0JSI).

Someone came up to her in the bathroom. “They’re talking shit about you.” A low murmur and the woman walked away. Carmela put her eyeliner back in her purse and followed her, catching her right outside the bathroom door. The roar of the nightclub was loud and oppressive.

“Who’s talking shit?” she demanded. The woman had wide brown eyes, freckles on her nose, teased brown hair. She looked afraid of Carmela but Carmela was used to that. She squeezed the woman’s wrist more tightly. “Who’s talking shit?” she said again.

“People,” the woman said evasively. “They say your man’s on the DL.”

Carmela didn’t feel like explaining the complexities of human sexuality at two a.m. in a nightclub. “What else do they say?”

“They say your man’s fucking around.”

“Who’s saying that?”

The woman tilted her head to the dance floor. “It’s mostly just this one girl.”

Nevada had been standing by the bar, illegally smoking a cigar and listening to the bartender’s dirty jokes. He must have gotten bored. He was dirty dancing with a pretty white girl, dyed red hair and fishnet stockings. He had his hands on her ass, on the small of her back. His hips were tight against hers. She looked to be enjoying it.

“She says she’s gonna be the new Queen Ramirez.”

Carmela released the woman’s wrist, took twenty dollars out of her purse and threw it at her. The woman caught it and bolted. Carmela looked back to the dance floor and the girl’s skirt was tugged up high enough for Carmela to see that they were only thigh highs. She turned away and stalked to the bar.

She wanted a rum and coke and she wanted to drain it in one long swallow. She got a glass of champagne instead and took slow measured sips, controlling her breathing. The music changed, the tempo increased. In the warped mirror behind the bar, she saw the redhead yell something in Nevada’s ear and Nevada lead her off the floor to some secluded back hallway.

She ordered a second glass of champagne.

She’d been with him when he was like that, heart still racing from dancing, sweat already on his neck and under his shirt. His hands pinching tight on purpose, to bruise as much as to contain. One of those brutal fast paced fucks she had to brace her neck against. They made her breasts ache. Less interested in her pleasure then other times but watching her intently. His gaze steady and fierce, like a video camera, like an escaped circus tiger. She would try to match him and fail; coming so hard she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t focus her eyes. He wouldn’t stop. Once she dragged her nails over his chin and brought up skin underneath them. He still didn’t stop. Driving her up through it into some other level of sensation, awareness, existence. Him coming without blinking, without a word. The contortions of his stomach muscles and the hitch in the back of his throat the only sign he’d enjoyed her at all.

She finished the second glass too soon and was disappointed with herself. She got a gin and tonic but had the bartender leave the champagne glass in front of her.

Nevada appeared from a doorway, tucking his shirt into his jeans and running a hand over his mouth before he approached. He got a shot brought to him without ordering and knocked it back.

She choked a little when he touched her and had to put down her glass, too hard, on the bar top. Nevada leaned away from her, hands flying up in a surrender motion, eyes rolling to the sky. She coughed, bringing her hand to her mouth, and then turned to beam a full faced smile at him.

“You scared me!” she announced coquettishly. She realized she was using her old work voice, the high pitched stripper giggle. She wondered if he would notice.

He didn’t seem to. He put his hand back on her, pulled her to his side. “You ready to go?”

She nodded and climbed down from the stool, winding a hand around his back, sticking her fingers in his back pocket as they barged through dancing couples and made for the front door. Across the street was a narrow strip of public park and past that a more crowded thoroughfare where they could grab a taxi. The cold outside hit her in the face and she wriggled against his warmth, tapping the fingers in his pocket against his ass.

“I don’t keep my wallet there anymore,” he joked. There was a noise behind them and she removed the hand. He chuckled like he’d caught her. “I know what you want.”

She took off her long beaded earrings and dropped them into the bottom of her purse. She undid the clasp of her tennis bracelet and wrapped it over her fist. “Uh huh,” she agreed.

“Nevada!” a feminine voice called after them. There was the clatter of heels on the pavement, coming their way. “You just left without saying goodbye.”

“Would you hold this?” she asked, shoving the purse at Nevada’s chest. He caught it with one hand, confusion on his face and that was last thing Carmela saw before she turned and punched the redhead directly in her heavily powdered nose.

The redhead went down off her heels into the grass and it seemed instantly there was a crowd around them, people running over from the line outside the club or appearing from the shadows made by trees and lampposts.

The redhead tried to get back up and Carmela hit her again, a huge wheeling roundhouse punch with trajectory visible from space. The girl didn’t dodge it, eyes wide like she didn’t believe it was happening. She stayed down after that, ass in the wet black grass.

Carmela’s brother Joseph had taught her to fight, a million years ago in Camden. He’d took her out back behind their little fourth floor walkup and held a pillow out in front of her tiny, thirteen year old fists. She’d asked him when she’d ever need to know this. He’d told her it was one of those things that was better to have and not need instead of need and not have. There were other things like that, he’d told her, but they were going to do this one first.

She got down on her knees over the other girl and cameras started flashing in the periphery. Nevada was yelling goodnaturedly to someone on the other side of the crowd, laughing between his words. She slammed her fist into the woman’s face again, a glancing blow that slid off her cheekbone and got tangled in her hair, ripping strands of dyed red out at the root. Carmela knew what box that color came from. She’d used it once in high school. The girl spat out the blood that was pouring from her nose and Carmela raised her hand again. The stones sparkled through the red.

A strong pair of arms caught her around her chest and dragged her back to her feet.

“That’s enough, mama,” he said. She fell against him and he moved her body without her assistance. “That’s enough.”

Nevada took her home, hands looped over her stomach in the back of the cab. In the morning, when the first three knuckles of her right hand swelled up, bruised and bloody, he was there. He kissed her hand, tongue seeking out the blood from the breaks in her skin. He brought a bowl of ice to her bed and had her sit between his legs with her hand in it while they watched daytime cable. The ice melted a track of cold water on her skin wherever he traced it. It rose up a path of goosebumps and he soothed them down again with the heat from his mouth.


	8. Gun Kink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A friend had an idea for "Nevada buys Carmela a gun"and I embellished.

He called her too early in the morning and told her to get dressed.

“Where we going, baby?” she asked, turning over onto her back and wriggling against the weight of her blankets. She had perfume bottles in the windowsill and the sun sprayed rainbows against the ceiling.

Nevada grunted a laugh. “Surprise.”

The shower pounded and stung, but couldn’t beat out the chill in her knuckle bones. She put on a halter sundress and keds, tucked her bikini into her purse and pinned up her hair. She was being too hopeful, but they’d talked a few days ago about going to the beach and she’d fallen asleep to the idea of hot sun and soft sand, bringing Nevada cold beers from the bar and watching the sweat run in droplets off his chest. The cool sting of the water. The smell of seaweed and salt.

She waited for three hours, lingering on the sofa with a stack of magazines. Sixteen Ways to Turn Him On. Five New Tricks to Blow his Mind. It all seemed so silly.

Someone leaned on the horn in the street outside her building and she went running down the stairs with the sounds of the tenants in the floors below coming through their doors as she ran by.

The car was on the corner and she lept inside. The back seat was empty.

“Where’s Nevada?”

The driver barely looked old enough to drive. He didn’t answer her.

They drove through the city, taking short cuts and wrong turns until Carmela could barely remember what borough she was in anymore. She draped her arm under her head and watched the sun flicker in and out from between the skyscrapers. The situation was unusual, but not dangerously so, and when she searched her stomach for a note of unease she couldn’t find it. Things would happen as they would happen.

The important thing was to keep her focus on herself. Nevada worried about Nevada; this was an immutable law of the universe. The concentrated will of his attention kept her place beside him as stable as it could be. Any energy she spent trying to worry just got in the way and the effort expended made her feel sick and messy and distracted in a way she never thought she could endure until it was over. She didn’t worry when he drank too much or when he ran around and he didn’t call her or when he put her in the backseats of strange cars and had her driven her in circles around the city. She couldn’t worry about it. There wasn’t enough of her.

After some time the car came to a halt outside a dismal looking storefront. There was dust in the windows and black out curtains over the door. Carmela rolled her eyes and slid from the car without questioning anything. She was content, if not always capable, in Nevada’s care.  
The room inside was wide and tall, lit from above with hanging scoop bulbs and filled all around its edges with heavy, glass topped cases lined in green and black velveteen. She leaned over onto a case and peered down past the glass. The case was full of guns.

A clerk appeared at the sound of the door. He was a young, stringy man with vivid green eyes. She knew that she would have found him knee weakeningly gorgeous, once upon a time, but that now she was only aware of his masculinity, hard and sweaty in the closed air of the quiet room.

“I don’t have any money,” she admitted.

The man shook his head. She didn’t mention it again.

From behind the counter he brought out a few choice pieces which clanked loudly against the glass. They looked too small to be real, too delicate to seem dangerous.

“What about those?” She gestured to the heavy revolvers beneath the glass.

“Too big for your hands.” He had a very faint Irish accent, a practiced American fake. “You need something small, for protection. Something that fits in the bottom of your purse.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

In the end she picked the prettiest one, the one that came with cream grips and gold paint along the slide. The shopkeeper had been trying to explain features to her but when she finally picked one he shut up abruptly with a note of relief.

He shrugged over his shoulder. “Come with me.”

There was a voice in the back of her head that sounded like her mother telling her not to follow strange armed men into back storerooms. But Nevada had sent her and the man had fear in the back of his eyes.

Behind the storerooms, down a flight of stairs, was a shooting range. Carmela recognized what it was from the movies. A long, empty room with sound proofing on the walls and a target hanging from a hook at the opposite end. There were rectangles painted on the rough concrete floor and the man had her stand in one while he loaded the little gun’s magazine. She put on earmuffs with heavy, orange pads and clear plastic glasses. He handed her the gun and she raised it, waited for his signal and then fired.

The recoil made her shiver. Skin pulled tight around her muscles and tingling between her thighs. The noise was so much less than she’d expected, tiny pops against the heavy pressure of the ear protection.

The man shifted her grip on the gun, his fingers hot against hers. He adjusted her shoulders. “Try to keep you eyes open.”

She kept her eyes open. This time she fired the whole clip.

The driver tried to take her home but she couldn’t do that anymore than she could take her hand off the little cream grips of the gun, stop her other fingers from fondling the little box of bullets, stop the throbbing in her stomach and the choked up feeling in her sinuses. She went to Nevada’s place, told the man in the lobby not to bother him, let herself up without announcement.

He was sprawled on his stomach on his silk sheeted bed. The heavy breathing pattern of him sleeping was achingly familiar to her. She still had the gun in her hand when she climbed on top of him, her ass heavy on his hipbone. His skin was so hot. She stroked the barrel of the gun against the skin of his bare back, up along the length of his neck into the scattered fringe of his hair. Her finger fiddled with the trigger.

His breathing didn’t change, but she knew he was awake.

“You gonna shoot me, honey?” he asked. His tone was light. Pleasant. Soothing.

“Uh huh.”

“You’re the only woman who could ever get the drop on me.” That wasn’t true. Not remotely.

He shifted underneath her, turning onto his back until she settled onto his hipbones. His cock was thick under his boxer shorts, heavy and limp against the crotch of her panties. He opened his eyes lazily, looking past the gun into her face.

She steadied her other hand on the gun and kept her eyes open. Nevada’s face was puffy with sleep and she watched him wet this bottom lip with the tip of his pink tongue.

“Easy,” he said. “Take it easy.”

She felt a quiet smile crawl across her face. The streak of gold paint looked so pretty against his sun bronzed skin. She pushed forward and inserted the barrel of the gun between his slick, swollen lips. He accepted it, his eyes still fixed on her until he saw pleasure in the set of her mouth. Then he turned his attention to the gun barrel and hollowed his cheeks against it, sucking it down so far that her finger along the trigger guard was wet to the second knuckle.

He moaned wantonly and she closed her eyes at the sound.

With a jerk he pushed the gun away from his face, pointing it at the ceiling. Carmela felt her arms tense, her fingers shake but she hadn’t pulled the trigger. He took the weapon from her easily, her arms tangled together over her right shoulder as he rose to her body. He was breathing heavy.

“Did you like your present?”

“I thought we were going on a trip,” she said, a playful whine in her tone.

“Greedy.” He pulled her to him, leaving the gun in the tangle of sheets behind her. His hand slid up to the top of her head, fingers thick in her hair. “Now you open your mouth.”

He was pushing her down to his lap and she shifted to her knees. She tasted cotton and then skin and smelled the strong animal smell of the sweat between his legs. She took him in her mouth, hands wrapped around the base of his thick cock. She knew how he liked this, messy and spit soaked and following the direction of his hands in her hair.

When he came he pushed her down so that she couldn’t breath and she couldn’t see and could only swallow and swallow and miss some, dribbling come out of the corners of her mouth. After a moment, he let her up and kissed her. He always kissed her afterward, even when her face was messy with him, never showed any shyness about his own taste. Nevada thrust his hand under her, seeking out her clitoris with the rough pads of his fingertips and she didn’t mean to come so soon but she did. The feeling burst from her explosively. She was thinking about his face around the barrel of the gun and the trembles in her skin when she’d pulled the trigger.

Nevada laid her down, limp and sweet, on the other side of the bed. He returned to his position on his stomach and a few minutes later he was snoring. Carmela’s heart slowed. She closed her eyes. The gun was lying in the bed between them.

She woke up late that evening, breathless, terrified from a dream she couldn’t remember.


	9. Jealousy

“Carmelita,” Nevada said and that’s all it took for her blood to run cold. It was a rooftop party, nearly dawn, the morning traffic starting to surge into the city. Nevada had appeared from nowhere after leaving her alone all night and she was standing too close to this boy who’d lent her a cigarette. Way too close and, god, his hand was around the small of her back, clearly visible before he recognized Nevada and snatched it away.

“Look man,” he was saying, trying to extricate himself from the confrontation. A moment ago he’d been brash and arrogant, slipping innuendo into his shit talking as he’d sidled up to her. “Look, I didn’t know. If she’d even mentioned the name Trujillo...”

“Shut up,” Nevada said. He didn’t look away from her.

“I…” she began and her throat was too dry to continue.

“You got yourself in a tight spot,” Nevada said. She nodded and he was nodding with her. “The ladies in there, they were rude to you and you had to get away.” She nodded again. One of Nevada’s sisters, in a gold ankle length dress, glaring at her over her champagne glass and she’d fled to the other side of a potting shed. Nevada advanced on her now and she drew herself back against the roof ledge. “You, let yourself get backed into a corner here,” Nevada said. He extended a sweating glass at her. It was bourbon and branch water and he’d clearly gotten it for himself. She accepted it anyway, took a sly sip.

“Thank you.”

He nodded at her. “It’s okay,” he said, flashing a tight smile. “I’m not mad…” He turned to look at the boy whose head was hanging morosely under the supervision of Nevada’s men. “I’m offended.” He gestured and the boy was yanked away by the fabric of his shirt, brought into the dark interior of the shed. Nevada patted her neck. “Finish your drink and then come in and join us.”

“Yes,” Carmela agreed although it wasn’t really a question. Nevada looked at the cigarette and she released it off the side of the building without stubbing it out. Her eyes followed the burning ember bouncing down against the bricks and fire escapes before extinguishing itself in the alley below. Nevada nodded and turned away.

“Give us at least five minutes.”

She gave them ten.

This had happened before, in clubs and bars. Once on a trip to Las Vegas a fellow at the craps table had given Carmela two hundred dollars for blowing on his winning dice and when Nevada had found out he’d fumed and raged and called her Carmelita for two days. His every touch had felt like fire. She’d intentionally baited him on the flight home so that he fucked her hard and vicious in the airplane bathroom, the door banging on its hinges and everyone outside knowing what was going on. He wasn’t in Las Vegas right now or even Atlantic City, where other people’s power had to be considered. He didn’t have to worry about stepping out of line by beating the shit out of this young man.

The last of the drink went down heavy in her stomach. She left the glass on the roof ledge.

Inside the shed, Nevada was alone with the boy. He was sitting in a heavy chair, it’s back fabric pulled away for repair. The boy was sitting on a low stool across from him. His lip was split and he was sitting on his hands.

“There she is!” Nevada said, mocking excitement in his voice. “Let me introduce you two. This is my Carmela and, my darling, this is, well, she doesn’t have to know your name. This is our chatty friend.” The boy had told her his name but she couldn’t remember it now. Nevada patted his lap and she went to him, sat down in his lap with his arm around her. He held her tight, looking her over, glancing down the neckline of her dress. It was new, clingy red satin and expensive. “Look at her,” Nevada said. “Isn’t she beautiful?” He smiled at her dopily. The boy was quiet and then Nevada glared at him. “I said, isn’t she beautiful?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? You didn’t even look at her. Take a look at her. Isn’t she beautiful?”

The boy glanced up tentatively at Carmela, caught her eye beseechingly. She shrugged a shoulder.

“Yes,” the boy said. “Yes, she’s very beautiful.”

“When I met this girl...I’m going to embarrass you now, baby….when I met this girl she was pole dancing  in this pit with a pack of ladies, all of them funny colored hair and plastic jewelry, dressed like those, you know, those Japanese porno cartoons.”  Nevada had  raised a hand and gestured toward the boy as he spoke to him. “I swear, she didn’t own a single thing that cost more than 15 dollars. But even then, in all that shit, I picked her out because I knew she had something they didn’t have. It’s in her eyes, all the time, even when she’s bawling or drunk or getting in trouble. She’s got something...some kinda…” He scowled for a moment his eyes growing distant as he searched for the words. Then he nodded. “She has worth. And so I made her mine.”

He looked at the boy and the boy nodded solemnly.

“Mine,” Nevada said, his face growing serious with the finality of the word. The boy swallowed. Nevada pinched her thigh so that she squirmed. “But I don’t want you thinking I’m one of those jealous guys, you know? I’m not.” He laughed and looked at her and she raised her eyebrows at him questioningly. “I’m not,” he told her. “I know other men, they look at you.” He turned his focus back to the boy. “How could they not look at her? But that doesn’t mean she’s not mine. You get it?”

The boy faltered in his reply and Nevada shook his head. “I see that you don’t understand,” he said, false sympathy warming his voice. “Let me see if I can explain.” He pulled Carmela close to him, arranged her back against the broad, warm surface of his chest. She could feel the cool metal of his necklace against her bare neck and then he pushed her down, opening his legs so that she sat between them on the wide vinyl chair and he could watch the boy over her shoulder.

“Look,” Nevada said and the boy obeyed. Nevada had a hand on her thigh, pushing his knuckles so that they were clamped between her legs. He tensed his fingers, jabbed a bruise into her skin until she understood what he wanted and opened her legs and pressed the outside of her knees to inside of his. Her panties were showing, she knew that without checking. The boy was trying to look at her without seeing her panties, trying not to look at her breasts or his face or her long bare legs. “Look,” Nevada. “Look hard.”

The boy glanced at her eyes and licked the blood off his lips.

“See,” Nevada said. “You want her. She turns you on. But she’s still mine.” He chuckled, a brief reflex of his ribcage against her back. “Touch her.” She could feel his cock, getting hard against the top of her ass.

“What?” the boy said, breathy and afraid.

“Touch her,” Nevada insisted. “Touch her, go on, get a feel of those long legs.”

She shifted to look at him and he leaned his temple against hers, pushing her back so that they were both looking at the boy. He said finish your drink first, she thought. He wanted another drink inside me. He wanted me loose and easy, like a doll. Heat was flaring up inside her and she relaxed into it. Her hands went limp at her sides, one thumb caressing fabric of his pants, the special slippery feeling of good wool. He rewarded her with a soft stroke up the side of her ribs and then took her right breast carefully in his hand, so that his fingers were pressed above her heart.

“I said touch her,” Nevada said. Then, generously, “you can stop sitting on your hands.”

The boy got up, shuffled over and paused, his hand trembling above Carmela’s slightly crooked knee. He looked at Nevada, at Carmela, at Nevada again.

“He’s getting bored with you,” Carmela said flatly and she felt Nevada’s cock jump, his hand squeeze more firmly at her breast.

The boy hastily moved to touch Carmela’s skin, rubbing a circle just around her kneecap.

“Nice soft skin,” Nevada said. “Long thin legs. Imagine them wrapped around your waist, huh? And see, you can touch her and you can want her…” The hand on her breast flattened to her stomach and pulled her back against him. “And yet, she’s still mine. Kiss her.”

The boy knew better than to hesitate. He leaned over, swallowed audibly and then gently pressed his lips to Carmela’s. His mouth was soft and tender  and Carmela couldn’t stop herself from pressing her tongue against his. His spit tasted sour with fear. He pulled away as soon as he could. She looked up at the boy dreamily, smiled at him.

“Still mine,” Nevada said, clicking his tongue against his teeth. He was so hard and she was braced so tightly against him. “I think you should get on your knees.”

The boy did, so quickly that he winced at the sting of his weight falling.

“Show me,” Nevada said. “Show me you understand how you should treat this woman. How you should treat what’s mine.”

The boy knelt and kissed the toe of Carmela’s red leather shoe, mouthing his way up past her right ankle, kissing her knee, dragging his tongue along her inner thigh. A hand slid up her hip, his knuckles would graze against the inside of Nevada’s leg. She wondered if she would sting against his bruised face or if he was still numb from impact.

Nevada took the silky fabric of her panties in both hands and ripped them open over her right leg, breathing hard against her ear. The boy surreptitiously palmed his own erection as he stooped to press his lips to her pussy. The moment before his tongue found her slick skin, she went dizzy with heat and want. She leaned back against Nevada, her head craned back against his shoulder. He brought a hand possessively to her throat.

She didn’t know if she should let herself moan, but found she was doing it anyway. Moaning and wriggling, so that the boy’s hand pushed hard against Nevada’s inseam.

Soft, she told herself, soft and without will. This wasn’t her power, it had to move through her. She undulated backwards against Nevada’s body and he dropped the hand from her throat, stroking down past her stomach to palm his hand against the boy’s close cropped hair.  He forced the boy’s head forward, lips tighter against her throbbing clit. Her sheen was slick on his face. She groaned, stifled it, and then brought her hand up to mirror the motion against Nevada’s own face, tangling her fingers in his hair and twisting so that Nevada was huffing and heaving as she trembled against him. He waited until he sensed she was nearly there, throwing herself forward toward her own pleasure, and then he pushed the boy’s head away. She whined high pitched and animal and he took both her wrists in one hand and pushed them into her stomach to keep her from touching herself.

He was still. “You can go,” he told the boy and then, louder for the benefit of whoever stood beyond the door, “get out!”

The boy fled. The door of the shed slammed behind him, shaking on its hinges. They waited a moment, Nevada still and quiet until it was clear no one else was coming inside.  His mouth was close to ear.

“Are you going to get up on this dick?”

“Yes.”

He released her, opened his belt, leaning back into the seat and sliding his legs out in front of him.  She got her center of gravity back beneath her and rose up on tensed thighs, pushing back and grabbing behind her so that, yes, she could take his cock in one smooth movement. She was so wet already, but the friction of it still burned with hot tendrils of pain in every thrust. Nevada put a hand on her back and started pushing her down, lower and lower until her breasts were grazing her legs and her hair was sweeping the ground, obscuring her vision. He’d be watching, she realized. Watching the sight of his own thick cock disappearing inside her. Watching her take it and take and take until her face was burning from pooled blood and her breath could barely get past the pressure in her sinuses.

Abruptly he pulled her back up, one hand between her legs to keep himself inside her as he ground into her body. “Gimmie,” he said and pawed at her jaw, craning her neck back to take her tongue. His mouth was warm and wet and there was nothing else to give. He’d emptied her out and filled her with himself and she was gone, she was noise and static and pleasure and she was his.

She had to come down from a long, long way off and she wasn’t all the way back in her body when she realized he was shaking her.

“Get it together,” he growled. “We’ve got to walk out of here cool.”

“And then?”

“And then we go to your place.” He got his feet underneath him and rose, pulling her up with him. “Take you back to your place and you’ll be good for me. You’ll be so good for me. So get it together.” She saw he was shaking at the same time he was willing himself to stop and she wondered if it was too much. If you could make yourself sick from the high of your own authority. The remnants of her panties fell down around her ankles and she stepped out of them, kicking them aside.

“I’m together,” she told him.

He put a hand under her elbow and gripped her so hard the skin around his fingers was white.  And then he walked her past his men whom he dismissed with a nod, walked her through the churning party into the elevator, and down into the street.

-

There was a sound at the door and then the key in the lock and Carmela sat up, ears tuned to the noise before recognizing its source. She got up out of bed and threw a robe on, then rushed to the door to undo the security chain.

“Joey!” she called in shock. “What are you doing here?”

“I said I was coming over.” He was hefting past her into the apartment, his battered metal tool box in one hand. His weight pushed her aside.

“You said you were coming over this afternoon.”

“My meeting got canceled. What do you care? You got a man over?”

“Joey…”

“Afraid I’m gonna tell mom your boyfriend’s not Sicilian? We all know you date wetbacks.”

“Joey…”

“Where’s this sink you said was leaking?”

“Joey!” she said, her voice shrill and then the bedroom door thudded open and Nevada was standing there.  He was barefoot, his pants unbuttoned, his stomach sticking out under his wife beater. Stark and sexual and looking grim.

“Oh,” Joey said. The toolbox bounced against his leg and he winced. “Hey there. Hey,  sorry man. You’re…Nevada, right?” He looked to her, nodding to check the name and she hated him for that gesture. Joey stretched out a hand. “I’m Joe Esposito. Mela’s my kid sister.”

Nevada didn’t speak. Joey withdrew his hand.

“I really didn’t mean to intrude. I didn’t think anybody but Mela’d be home in the middle of the day, you know?” He laughed. “Some guys have all the luck. For real, man, what do you do?”

Carmela rolled her eyes, scoffing hard against her front teeth. “Jesus, Joey, what do you do?”

Joey flashed her a steely glare. “Mechanic,” he told her, pointedly.

Carmela laughed. _Honey, this is my brother who works in a chop shop. Joey, this is my Dominican boyfriend who traffics drugs._ She brought her hand to her forehead and pressed against the skin. The men were silent for an awkward moment. Joey tried to break the tension with another broad smile.

“Hey now, you know I didn’t mean anything with that wetback remark. That’s just, you know…”

Carmela put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him toward the door. “You know, Joey, I’m just gonna call the super about that leak.”

“You sure? I’m here already.”

“Yeah, I mean. He gets paid all that fucking money, right? He should fix stuff when it breaks. Don’t worry about it. And don’t worry about lunch either, okay? I’ll come out to Mom’s place some time next week, okay? Okay.”

The door closed and Carmela heard the sound of Joey muttering to himself as he clattered down the stairs. Nevada pushed her aside, went to the door and flipped the deadbolt determinedly. Carmela backed to the coffee table, stopping when it hit her calves. Nevada let out a sigh with his voice behind it, a low, rumbling growl.

“Mela?” he remarked coldly.

Carmela smiled. “Uh, your sisters call you Neve.” It was the wrong tone. His back muscles tightened.

“And he has a key,” Nevada said. He turned on her, hiking up the waistband of his unbuttoned pants and squaring his shoulders before advancing. “I don’t like it.”

Carmela tried to shrug it off. “He’s my brother. It’s not…”

“I don’t like it,” he repeated. “I don’t like him knowing my name, knowing I’m here. I don’t like him…” He shook his head, searching for words through his anger. “I don’t want him coming up here, letting himself into your place with tools and god knows…”

“You’re telling me I can’t see my brother?”

“I’m saying I don’t want him letting himself in. I don’t want him bringing over tools. He doesn’t need to do that.”

She spread her arms wide in bafflement. “Yeah, like you’re gonna fix my sink.”

He slapped her, pulling the movement at the last moment so that the impact was all noise and sting. He’d hit her before, several times, but never like that. Not without firmness, control, presence. Not with his breath coming in and out of his mouth in short, scared gasps. It had never felt wrong  for him to hit her before. She wanted to push him, shove him back against the door by his shoulders. She saw herself do it, replayed the image in her mind but when her hands went up they reached to touch his face.

He flinched from her and she shook her head.

“I’ll fix it,” she said. Her voice was soft and soothing. He nodded at her, looked to her outstretched hands suspiciously. “I’ll fix it,” she said again.

There was no way, she told herself, no way he was that fragile.

She threw herself around his neck and he sank into her arms, wrapping his hands around her body, lifting her up. She hitched her pretty, long legs around his waist and he carried her back to the bed. They fell down onto it together and lay like that, entwined with his head buried in her breasts, for a long time.


	10. Defiance

Nevada called her in the late morning. “I just got out,” he said. “Are you home?”

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t have time to be short with him because he hung up on her. He was always hanging up on her. Forty five minutes later he let himself in, hair still wet and wearing his flip flops. She threw down her phone, some bad tile game she wasn't really playing, and rose to meet him. 

Her mouth was still thick with the taste of tequila, but her hangover had faded somewhere under her fury. Her mind was tensed and hazy. She could call up the night before in vivid recollection, the drinking and dancing and dragging her best friend Dia into some damn restaurant for some of that luscious pineapple filled cake she only half remembered they made there. They’d gone stumbling out into the street with the cake in plastic to go boxes, shoveling it into their mouths with bent plastic forks.

“You didn’t call me last night.” 

He looked tired and something else. Not angry, not flashing eyes and a dangerous set to his mouth. No, he looked drained and annoyed and, yes, pissy. “I was busy.”

She didn’t have the energy for his emotions at the moment. Dia and her, last night, swanning in the streets with sugar on their lips. Coming around the corner to be confronted with the distant shape of Nevada, leaned up against a stoop, one hand going into his pocket to tuck away a wad of money and the girl. The girl, short black hair and perfect dark skin, fumbling something into her bra and falling down Nevada’s body to her knees.

The police car had pulled up a moment later.

“It was my birthday.”

Carmela had dropped her cake in the street.

Nevada flinched. It felt good to make him flinch a little. “Oh, honey, you know I’m don’t remember stuff like that.” He showed her his palms, smiled at her lopsided and weary. 

“Jesus!” She snapped. “So put it in your fucking phone like everybody else in the fucking world. Do you know how embarrassed I was? I had to watch you get taken away in handcuffs. With the cops calling you 'ese' and Dia looking at me like my dog just died. Did you see that?”

“I saw it.”

“On my birthday!” She sank her hands into her hair and tugged

“You’re mad because I didn’t take you out.” He was trying to scoff her off. "I don't go all gooey on you."

“I went out. I was having fun by myself. I didn’t want you to send me roses and take me dancing, I wanted you to not get arrested for soliciting a blow job on the fucking street.” She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the wall. “On my fucking birthday!”

“Jesus, woman. I wasn’t getting a hooker.” His voice was rough and she wondered how well he’d been able to sleep in holding. If he had time for his coffee after rushing home to wash the sweat and police station out of his hair.¨Those cops were just fucking me around. It’s just a little possession and public indecency charge. It’ll go away by next week.”

She rolled her eyes. “So that makes it better. Absolutely.”

“You want to hit me?”

The remark was so wildly off the mark that it fired a fresh surge of anger through her. She sighed, turning her face down to the floor and glaring at up at him through the fringe of her bangs. He was smiling a soft, resigned smile. 

“You want to hit me,” he said, nodding his head. “You can.” He approached her gently, cocking his head to the side, presenting her with the curve of his cheekbone. “Come on,” he said, patting his cheek. “Come on. You can hit me. I won’t fight back.” He was dropping to his knees, pulling at the buttons of his shirt to open it. He was barechested underneath. “Go on and hit me. Punish me.”

She pushed at him, bouncing a hand off the meat of his shoulder. The contact made her feel ridiculous, boiled the tension in her gut so that she had to breathe to stifle it. She collected her strength, pulled back her hand and slapped him cold across the face.

He had been expecting it and braced against the impact. He didn’t move.

She did it again and again, raining slaps down on him with both hands across Nevada’s face and chest. She fell down on top of him, pushing him onto his back on the floor. 

“That’s it, honey,” he was crooning. She drove her knee into his chest and when she ground her knuckles into his jaw he raised his hands. “That’s it.” Their hands got all tangled together, but there wasn’t any strength in Nevada’s arms. She pushed his hands together above his head, pinned his wrists to the floor.

It wasn’t the blowjob. It wasn’t every blowjob and back alley screw. She leaned over him, sliding her leg down onto the other side of his chest so that she straddled him. It was everything that would never happen in her life because he was in it. She slapped him again, leaning low so that her breasts were slipping from her shirt. He was relaxing into it, letting her move him. Once more, hard, for coffee dates and romantic movies. Once more for family Christmas and Sunday brunch. Once more for tickets to the Met and ‘honey would you pick up my drycleaning’ and engagement rings and Vera Wang and everything she didn’t have and didn’t know if she really wanted.

He worked to catch his breath, making rough sounds in the back of his throat.

“Is that it?” she asked him. He was smiling at her. She reached behind her to stroke between his legs, to feel the hard on she knew would be there. “Is that all you are? Pretty boy street thug asshole. You like getting beat up by girls?” There was bile writhing in the back of her throat. She thought about spitting on him but she couldn’t get the saliva to come together in her mouth. Her hand tightened on his cock. “Is this all you are?”

He sat up, lifted her shirt to press his reddened face against her skin. His mouth found her breasts and that felt good. That felt narrow and tolerable. She wrapped her arms around his head, held him as he mouthed at her breasts and pawed at her ass. She hadn’t put on underwear that morning, just the thin slip and tank top to answer the phone. He was touching her under that slip, stroking over the curve of her ass, down between her legs where she was wet.

“You can’t go to jail,” she said. “You can’t go. If you go I won’t have anything.”

“Shhh,” he said and she fell silent. He tilted his face to hers and kissed her, slow and sweet and overwhelming. He had slid a hand around her to unbutton his fly. ¨I had a rough night, baby.¨

She shoved him back down again in irritation. “I don’t care about your night yet.”

She got up on top of him, got his cock underneath her and sank down on it. He made an approving hum and then a whine when, rather than lift herself up to repeat the motion, she ground down against him.

She kept it up, the sweet, smooth movements, rocking tight to his body. It felt good, solid and full. He leaned up, straining his neck and snapping his teeth at her. She kissed him, open mouth and hot tongue, but she didn’t quicken her rhythm. His thighs were tense and his stomach was seizing.

She came shuddering and tingling in her temples. Her awareness flooded into the moment. The place of that room, the filthy living room floor in that shitty apartment building on that bad corner in the upper part of Manhattan. Nevada under her, sweating and tired and human. 

At the moment she saw the twitching in the corner of his eye she lifted off him, trapping his cock between their bodies and watching him come all over his stomach and her thighs. He made a sound like she’d hurt him and then he grabbed her to him with his hands like steel and held her viciously against his chest.  
-  
Nevada went out for cigarettes and came back two hours later. She was redoing her nails at her vanity, filing the last of the barbs off before coating them cotton candy pink. He came into the room and turned her on her stool. 

“You still sulking?”

“I’m not sulking,” she said. He smiled, kissed her temple, knelt down on the floor. 

“Come here,” he said and she leaned forward to him. He took his hand from his pocket and turned her head, first to one side and then to the other. His eyes were focused on her carefully. She felt his long fingers careful at her ears, manipulating something into her pierced earlobes and then attaching the backs with dexterity. Earrings, cool and heavy. He adjusted the right one and then turned her back on the stool to look at herself in the mirror.

Diamonds. Solitary. Platinum or maybe white gold.

She smiled despite herself. “They’re not real,” she said.

“They better be.”

They were stunning, at least two carats and brilliantly luminant. She could see him in the mirror. He embraced her from behind, buried his nose in the curve of her neck and drew in a lungful of her smell. She held up her head and examined herself. The earrings suited her. They made her look cool, elegant, sophisticated, beautiful. And sad.


	11. Plot

She could tell it was him by the sound of his feet on the stairs and then, from the sound of the doorknob burying into the wall as he threw open the door, she could tell that he was angry. She was already sitting on the kitchen floor. Her knees were pulled to her chest. She was cold under a thin slip.

Nevada went into her bedroom first and, not finding her, pulled the mirrored back of her vanity away from the wall and dumped it onto the floor. She heard the heavy piece of furniture fall, the mirror cracking and crashing on the floor. She could see it in her mind like it was happening in front of her. His shoes would trod on the pieces and crack them further. Her open face powder would slosh onto the floor. 

“Carmelita!” he called and she flinched.

He found her in the kitchen next. There were not a lot of corners to her apartment and she wasn’t actively hiding. He picked her up, skinny arms and cold skin, and threw her back against her refrigerator.

“I’m sorry,” she said and she meant it. 

Nevada’s face was still. He caught her arms in his wide hands and rocked her back and forth until she ceased to struggled against him.

“Did you think?” he asked and she considered the question before she realized it was only a preamble. “Did you think...did you think I wouldn’t FIND OUT?” 

He shouted all at once when he was angry and the tone made her shrink down within her skin. It made her brain stop working. She shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I was so scared…”

He dragged her after him, taking her from the kitchen, the apartment, down to the street. “Come with me,” he said. He called her words she couldn’t find in her Spanish-English dictionary even trying every spelling she could imagine. He called her a whore too, in English, so that she would understand.

At the street he wedged her under his arm and made her walk between him and the street, which he never did. They walked for blocks until the concrete wore all the dance calluses off her feet and began to scrape up her soles. She didn’t know where they were going, couldn’t find the breath to ask. Abruptly, he turned a corner and then threw her into an alley.

“Look,” he commanded and turned her head with a grip on her ear. Her back was stinging against the brickwork.“Look over there.”

It took a moment for the man to appear. A man pacing back and forth across the corner. Frustrated, like he’d lost track of someone. He pulled out a cell phone and yelled into it. Familiar. Carmela’s head swam as she tried to place him. She’d had a meeting with that man once, in a crowded office pool. Oh shit.

“What’d you do, honey?” Nevada wrenched her frightened face back to him, looking into it without any shred of love or kindness or caring on his own. “Are you talking to the feds about me? Are you ratting me out to the cops?”

“Wait, I didn’t…” she began stuttering. He had twined his fingers into her long hair and pulled. Pain blossomed in her scalp, in the muscles of her neck. He thrust her back against the brick again. 

“You were talking to the police,” Nevada said. “You got scared and stupid and you talked when you should have stayed quiet, right?”

“No!” She swallowed. “I mean,” she revised. Honesty. Be honest and tell him everything.“I did talk to him but that was months and months ago, baby. I swear to Christ, I didn’t tell him anything. I didn’t even know anything to tell him back then. Please…”

Nevada didn’t so much as blink.

“He’s a vice officer and he called me in and asked me a whole bunch of questions about the club and about my boyfriend but I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even tell him your name!”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying. Why would I lie to you?” She tried to touch him, to change his grip on her into something like caresses. He pushed her off, shaking his head.

“You said sorry. Before. You apologized. You’re scared now and you’re lying.”

“I thought you found out about something else…”

He shook her and she burst, suddenly, into tears. She had wanted to cry since seven o’clock that morning and hadn’t let herself. That morning a nurse had a put a hand on her shoulder and told her they would take care of her and she had almost clutched the woman to her chest in misery and fear. “I thought you found out,” she said, voice thick behind her tears. “I thought you found out about the baby.”

Nevada froze. He already had a hand raised and she looked at his open palm, stopped in the air, opening and closing like an eye. The focus went briefly out of him.

“There was going to be a baby,” Carmela said. Her face was so hot she could barely breath. “I’m sorry. There was going to be but I just couldn’t...I was so scared. I just couldn’t…”

He pushed away from her and without the stabilizing influence of his opposition, Carmela fell down the brick wall. She wiped the tears out of her eyes and looked up at him. 

Nevada was staring down at her with his mouth hanging open. He wasn’t angry anymore and the rush of the emotion leaving his body had made his face pale, his eyes narrow. He was looking at her like he’d never seen her before or rather, like he was seeing her properly for the first time since he’d met her. Like she had been a reflection of him visible in glass and then, with her confession, she had tumbled out full bodied into the real world. 

“A baby-baby?” he asked. “There was going to be a baby?”

“Yes.”

“And there isn’t going to be one anymore?”

“There isn't.”

He helped her up off the ground and swatted at the dirt on her slip. Recognizing her cold skin, her state of undress, he took his heavy jacket off and put it around her shoulders. She was suddenly enveloped in his smell.

He looked at her, glanced down the street at nothing, shut his mouth with an audible click of his teeth. She wanted to reach for him but there was too much cold air outside the layer of the jacket. He looked at her again and struggled at something, his eyes darting along her upturned face. Then he turned on his heel, shoved his hands into his pockets and strode off down the other end of the alleyway to disappear into the street beyond.

Carmela walked home on bruised feet. She had to ask the super to let her into her apartment

Nevada didn't call her for three weeks.


	12. "Rise and Shine, Sweet Thing."

Vacations suited them. The sun was so hot and bright and dazzling that it swamped Carmela’s senses, leaving her stunned in the soft, white sand. Her little black bikini was snug enough to feel like skin. She'd slicked her hair back over her ears and she wore fake designer mens sunglasses she’d found in a pocket of Nevada’s suitcase. Nevada always had ten or twelve pairs of fake designer sunglasses scattered amongst his belongings. They were too big for her narrow face. She could smell the ocean and the heavy, sweet smells of overpriced cocktails coming from the bar just up the beach. One melted in a pile of sand at her shoulder. 

“This isn’t a real beach,” Nevada had told her when they first arrived. “This is a tourist beach. A party beach. For white people." Real beaches didn't have bars or potted palm trees or perfectly maintained sand. She’d asked him if he’d wanted to go to the real beach and he’d tackled her into the water. She smiled at the memory, the cool embrace of the surf up over her head. The riptide tugging her out and Nevada pulling her back.

She reached over for her drink, couldn’t find it, decided she wasn’t thirsty.

“Rise and shine, sweet thing.” Nevada stood in front of the sun. She knew it was Nevada before she even slitted her eyes behind the sunglasses to peak out at him. Even his shadow felt solid on her.

She’d been so vividly remembering his hands and her high, delighted shrieks that she didn’t quite respond to his voice. She wasn’t asleep, not exactly, but she was sunbaked and far away. She shook her head, struggling to come back to the present moment under the onslaught of the sun.

“Come on,” Nevada coaxed. “Wakey wakey.”

“Hmm,” Carmela said in response. Her voice was thick and sleepy.

“Come sit under the trees for a while." 

“Uh uh,” she said, shaking her head a bit. She turned, allowing the other side of her neck to stretch into the sun. 

“You’re gonna get too dark.”

Carmela shook her head again. “I’m from Jersey. We don’t burn.” She conceded slightly, however, and turned onto her stomach, burying her face in the crook of her arm. She wriggled her body, the newly exposed skin warming in the sunshine. 

Nevada sat down next to her in the sand. He wore cut offs instead of a swimsuit, no matter how much she teased him, and she could feel him cool and wet at her side. His thigh touched against her hip, the dry bikini fabric sucking moisture from his denim.

“What is this shit?” he picked up the bottle of tanning oil. “Skin cancer in a bottle.” She heard him uncap it and then, a minute later, felt his hands hot and strong working the muscles of her back. He lifted a leg over her body and sat down, wet and messy on her legs. The strings of the cutoffs tickled her skin.

“Whatcha doing with that oil, Mister?” She stretched backward, catlike, and his fingers slipped to her ass. 

“This is a public beach,” Nevada said seriously.

“Pussy.”

He spanked her smartly and she fell back onto the sand. A burst of childish giggles arose to her left. She shifted, pushed up her sunglasses and caught a blushing preteen face turning her attention to a heavy paperback in a garish color. The girl was slight and blonde, a frizzy mop of hair held back by a handkerchief. 

“You’ve got a fan,” she remarked. She buried her face in her arm again, eyebrow raised.

“Eh, maybe she’s looking at you.” Nevada found a knot under her shoulder blade and pushed it with his thumb until it spasmed and released. Moving down, he undid the tie on strap of her bikini and let it fall to the sides. Studiously, he applied more oil.“Maybe she’s hoping she’ll grow up to look like you...except for the skinny tits.”

Carmela squawked in outrage. “I do not…” she said, slightly muffled by the sand, “have skinny tits.”

“Sure you do,” he said, hands moving down her sides to outline the curves of her breasts. She tried to squirm in defiance but didn’t dare raise up too much off her towel. “See,” he said, after ghosting her sides a few times. “They’re barely a handful.”

“You just have freakishly large hands.”

He laughed, joy bubbling up out of his chest unbidden. “Well, you know what they say about us guys with big hands.” He leaned down close, so that his bare stomach was resting on the downy soft skin of her lower back. “We wear big gloves.”

Nevada got down on his stomach next to her, one arm heavy and sweet across her bare back. He nuzzled the back of her neck. She glanced up again, caught the preteen staring at them wide eyed. The girl looked away again, buried her nose in her book.

“She thinks you’re cute,” Carmela said. There was a flame of concern tickling at the bottom of her mind. 

“No accounting for taste,” Nevada slurred. 

She caught her loose bikini top up against her breasts with one arm and rolled to face Nevada. The sun glared into the corner of her eye beyond the rim of the sunglasses. His cheek was propped on one fist.

“She’s thinking about oh how handsome you are. How sexy and strong and if she only had a man like you she’d never have to worry about anything ever again.”

He smiled at her sleepily. “You shouldn’t make up stories just to get yourself upset.”

She laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. 

“You wanna come down to the water with me?”

She shook her head, leaned her forehead against his.

“You wanna go up to the house?” He flicked the end of her nose. “Have some fun. Maybe get some dinner in a few hours?”

“You making the dinner?”

“I’m making the dinner.”

She nodded in agreement and he kissed her. His mouth was hotter than the sunshine.


	13. Plot

They’d fallen into bed together a few hours ago after a long lazy day, late lunch at place Nevada knew, walking home with the sky lit up all orange and pink behind the buildings. They had made the sweet kind of love where he called her a “good girl,” and laughed when she was coming. Nice laughing, not cruel and he used his hands softly, put his weight on his forearms. Afterward he held her in his arms for a long time while he slept. 

They began to stir again at ten o’clock. She brought him a bottle, got herself a gin and tonic in a mason jar. She took it to the vanity to brush out her hair. It had been braided wet that morning and was now in curls, shortening the length and pulling at her scalp in interesting, unfamiliar ways. 

“What do you take?” he asked. He had laid back in her bed, the sheet tangled around his waist and tracing the curve of his stomach. He leaned toward her onto his hip, propped his head up on his hand and smiled.

“What?”

“To keep from catching? I know you don’t take pills.”

She put down the brush. “Did you just say ‘catching?’” She could tease him sometimes about his words, when he was loose and easy like this and had some beer in him to make him mellow.

He ignored the question. “I don’t think you take pills. I don’t see them around.”

Her hair fell in static and silk against her neck. She shook it and she saw him watch the way the highlights flickered as she moved. She smiled, amused at his interest. “I get a depo shot at the free clinic.”

His eyebrows went up in surprise. “They have a shot that makes you not get pregnant?”

“Yep.” She looked back to her vanity. She had propped a new mirror against the empty back, where the old mirror had shattered on the floor. It fell sometimes but it didn’t have the cloudy, tinted defect in its top right corner. It was better, really. 

“And that time...what happened that time?” He had shifted onto his back, was watching the shadows on the ceiling. His hand was still at his head, his fingers combing through his hair. Carmela picked up a eyeliner pencil and made an adjustment to her right lid. 

“Um,” she said. They had never really talked about it. “I forgot. You have to get the shot every so often and I forgot to go.” She glanced back at him in the mirror. He caught her eye, put out a hand to her, the empty bottle rolling to the other side of the bed. 

Carmela went to him and laid at his sides. His arms opened to embrace her.

“What if you didn’t?” Nevada rolled over on top of her. He was warm, coaxing her legs apart to nestle between them.

“Then I’d get knocked up.”

“Right. With my baby.”

He looked so happy. She smiled at him but had to flick her eyes to the ceiling. It was too big a notion to consider seeing his face.“Your baby.”

“Yes.” He raised an eyebrow. She put her hands on either side of his face, cool skin against his hot cheeks, and then brought his head forward so that she could kiss his lips. He arched, fumbling under the hem of her t-shirt with long fingers and then he was inside of her and his width made vivid the ache from before. She shivered. His mouth fell away from hers.

“Mmm,” she said and his hands were all over her, stroking the heavy weight of her breasts, raising her thigh so that she fell open for him. “Your baby.” Her breath was coming more quickly, his movements carried more force. She wrapped her arms around his neck, bony elbows sticking out on each side. “Your little boy.”

He moaned into the flat place between her breasts.

“It won’t happen right away,” she told him, later, They were all curled up so that he couldn’t see her face.  He had drunk all the beer in her house and they were waiting for someone to stop by with another case. When she spoke, he smiled, eyes crinkling and teeth showing.

“It might,” he said. “I’m very good. 

Her next shot was due in three weeks. She put the matter out of her mind, didn’t think about it in that explicit, intentional way. Twice she got ginger ale for the first drink of the night and Nevada didn’t make any comments about drinking alone. 

The day it would have been late she woke up too early and the day was fresh rain and melting snow. She went rushing down to the women’s clinic in her heels and cheap fur coat and announced that she needed her next shot today, that day and cried on an admitting nurse until he fit her in. She took the band aid off in the lobby and made sure to throw it away before she got anywhere near her apartment.


End file.
